The Non-Green Weenie of the Week, and Other Notes

It’s pretty obvious that this week’s Green Weenie has to go to Michael Mann for his threatened libel suit against National Review, but since I already manhandled (heh) Mann here a couple days ago, there’s no need to high-stick him again (double-heh). I’m sure Mann will win a shelf full of Green Weenies if this suit proceeds, and in any case he’s a lock for the eventual Power Line Green Weenie Hall of Fame (Paul Ehrlich will be the first inductee, needless to say).

Not a Green Weenie

So how about we do a reverse-green weenie, and salute someone who’s most definitely not a Green Weenie? My first selection for the non-green weenie is Roger Scruton. I’ve mentioned Roger Scruton’s fine new book on environmental philosophy for conservatives, How To Think Seriously About the Planet, before, but my recent review of the book in National Review is now half-out from behind the subscriber firewall (it’s 50 cents for the whole article, but free if you’re an NR digital subscriber), and in the review I have this to say about it:

[H]is new book deserves to be regarded as the most important environmental book of the last 20 years. If the environmental movement takes it seriously, it might find a way out of the dead end into which it has force-marched itself. And conservatives who embrace his rich arguments will find a way of contesting the Left for ownership of environmental issues that doesn’t depend on arid and utilitarian cost-benefit arguments or the ritual denunciations of the leftist view. Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of Scruton’s book is that it traverses most of the key issues without recourse to the standard clichés of either side. Even when he is taking on the worst of fever-swamp environmental leftism, his critique is all the more devastating for his calm and understated prose.

Does it seem like the Left’s reaction to recent GOP running mates has gone far beyond the norms of election-season partisanship? There’s a reason for this: Both Paul Ryan and Sarah Palin represent mortal threats to the core of modern liberalism in a way that Dick Cheney and Dan Quayle (and their respective chiefs) never did, and therefore they have to be crushed by any means necessary. The reason for the vitriolic reaction to Sarah Palin four years ago was simple: She threatened to shatter a pillar of the Left’s identity politics by contesting its monopoly on “women’s issues.” Ryan represents a triple threat. Most obviously, his fiscal plans threaten the Left’s entitlement mentality, and his personality and charisma may hive off the youth vote. But the deepest fear is that Ryan will challenge directly the core philosophy of today’s so-called progressivism.

But if you’re not an NR subscriber, and you weren’t up at 6 am eastern time Thursday to hear me on the Bill Bennett show explaining the article, you can download an MP3 file of the first hour of the show right here. (Watch out Hinderaker-Ward Experience! I’m breathing down your neck.)